The Troubadours at Home: Their Lives and Personalities, Their Songs and Their World - Vol. 1

IT required but little time for Arnaut de Maruelh to become a favorite in the court of Béziers, and he needed
hardly more to fall in love with Lady Alazais.

Fair days and sweet and rich in love
Are these when verdure springs anew,
And light of step and blithe I view
With gladness every opening flower,
And sing of love with hopefulness and cheer;
For morn or eve no care or thought comes near
Save thoughts of love, my joyous bosom thronging.

For I adore one far above
The fairest that I ever knew,--
So noble, too, so good, so true,
Her virtues e'en her charms o'ertower;
And this is why I tremble and I fear;
I cannot win her; yet, the more 't is clear,
The more I love, the keener is my longing.1

It was no base and selfish passion that he felt. The
gathered energy of a loving and aspiring heart had simply
found the directing it had long awaited. To love so beautiful a lady, one so exalted in station, so charming in manner, so graced with all the accomplishments of courtly
life,--to his mind this was the only natural, the only
reasonable course. For while the Greeks and Romans

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